What it is?

"What it is?" Rachel asked me the other day.

It looked like she was poking her eye, but she was stopping just short of that and rubbing her finger along her eyelashes.

"What it is?" She asked again and again and again. "What it is?"

"Those," I told her, "Are called eyelashes."

"Oh," she sighed, still rubbing her finger gently across them, "I like those!"

She still gets eyebrow and eyelash confused, but she's slowly working through the finer details of anatomy.

The other day, while I was still in bed and Andrew and Rachel were breakfasting together, Rachel informed Andrew that Baby Miriam was inside her tummy. They woke me up by "putting" Miriam back in Mommy's tummy. This may or may not have involved some tickling.

Later that same day, I told Rachel that I could feel the baby kicking and that she could come and feel her if she wanted to. Instead of coming over to me, Rachel put her hands on her own stomach.

"Yeah, baby's kicking," she said, "Right there."

My question is that if Rachel has taken over carrying the baby...why am I still tired?

Another thing Rachel has been saying lately is "I don't," as in, "I don't nap time" or "I don't bed time." She says it as matter-of-factly as if she's informing me she's just given up a nasty habit.

Oh, you don't nap time? Well, I'm trying to give it up, myself.

As far as I can figure she's using "nap time" and "bed time" as verbs...or she's leaving off the verb altogether and is sticking with the dummy "do" verb to express all her actions. With all the extra verbs we use in our sentences to help the main verbs make sense, I can't blame her for being a little bit confused. She's rather serious about don't-ing nap time, though. She tells it to me when she wakes up in the morning, every time I yawn, during lunch, while playing blocks...you know, just in case I forget that she doesn't nap time.

Last night she told Andrew, right before family prayer (and therefore, right before bedtime), "I don't bed time."

He looked at her and said, "Well, you don't verbs, either, but you still have to bed."

And then we laughed as only language nerds can.

We've been playing a lot of games recently. Rachel likes to play games. Playing games with her is interesting, but she usually does an okay job if the game she wants to play is a real game that we know about--like UNO or Princess Go Fish or something like that. Occasionally she'll ask to play "big, red game" and I have no idea what that is or means or how to play and any game I've tried to invent with the given criteria has been an absolute flop, involving tears and tantrums and everything.

While we're playing real games, however, she's a hoot. Every time she gets to play a card she says triumphantly,

"PLAY GAME!"

Every. Single. Time. It's hilarious.